1.
"Tell me about the
thumb. I know what you told me on the phone, but tell, me everything
now."
Starkey inhaled half an
inch of cigarette, then flicked ash on the floor, not bothering with the
ashtray. She did that every time she was annoyed with being here, which
was always.
"Please use the ashtray, Carol."
"I missed."
"You didn’t miss."
Detective-2 Carol Starkey took another deep
pull on the cigarette and crushed it out. When she first started seeing
this therapist, Dana Williams wouldn’t let her smoke during session.
That was three years and four therapists ago. In the time Starkey was
working her way through the second and third therapists, Dana had gone
back to the smokes herself, and now didn’t mind. Sometimes they both
smoked and the goddamned room clouded up like the Imperial Valley capped
by an inversion layer.
Starkey shrugged.
"No, I guess I didn’t miss. I’m just
pissed off, is all. It’s been three years, and here I am back where I
started."
"With me."
"Yeah. Like in three years I shouldn’t
be over this shit."
"So tell me what happened, Carol. Tell me
about the little girl’s thumb."
Starkey fired up another cigarette, then
settled back to recall the little girl’s thumb. Starkey was down to
three packs a day. The progress should have made her feel better, but
didn’t.
"It was Fourth of July. This idiot down in
Venice decides to make his own fireworks and give them away to the
neighbors. A little girl ends up losing the thumb and index finger on
her right hand, so we get the call from the emergency room."
"Who is ‘we’?"
"Me and my partner that day, Beth Marzik."
"Another woman?"
"Yeah. There’s two of us in CCS."
"Okay."
"By the time we get down there, the family’s
gone home, so we go to the house. The father’s crying, saying how they
found the finger, but not the thumb, and then he shows us these homemade
firecrackers that are so damned big she’s lucky she didn’t lose the
hand."
"He made them?"
"No, a guy in the neighborhood made them,
but the father won’t tell us. He says the man didn’t mean any harm.
I say, your daughter has been maimed, sir, other children are at risk,
sir, but the guy won’t cop. I ask the mother, but the guy says
something in Spanish, and now she won’t talk, either."
"Why won’t they tell you?"
"People are assholes."
The world according to Carol Starkey,
Detective-2 with LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section. Dana made a note
of that in a leather-bound notebook, an act which Starkey never liked.
The notes gave physical substance to her words, leaving Starkey feeling
vulnerable because she thought of the notes as evidence. Starkey had
more of the cigarette, then shrugged and went on with it.
"These bombs are six inches long, right?
We call’m Mexican Dynamite. So many of these things are going off, it
sounds like the academy pistol range, so Marzik and I start a
door-to-door. But the neighbors are just like the father--no one’s
telling us anything, and I’m getting madder and madder. Marzik and I
are walking back to the car when I look down and there’s the thumb. I
just looked down and there it was, this beautiful little thumb, so I
scooped it up and brought it back to the family."
"On the phone, you told me you tried to
make the father eat it."
"I grabbed his collar and pushed it into
his mouth. I did that."
Dana shifted in her chair, Starkey reading from
her body language that she was uncomfortable with the image. Starkey
couldn’t blame her.
"It’s easy to understand why the family
filed a complaint."
Starkey finished the cigarette and crushed it
out.
"The family didn’t complain."
"Then why--?"
"Marzik. I guess I scared Marzik. She had
a talk with my lieutenant, and Kelso threatened to send me to the bank
for an evaluation."
LAPD maintained its Behavorial Sciences Unit in
the Far East Bank building on Broadway, in Chinatown. Most officers
lived in abject fear of being ordered to the bank, correctly believing
that it called into question their stability, and ended any hope of
career advancement. They had an expression for it: Overdrawn on the
career account.
"If I go to the bank, they’ll never let
me back on the bomb squad."
"And you keep asking to go back?"
"It’s all I’ve wanted since I got out
of the hospital."
Irritated now, Starkey stood and lit another
cigarette. Dana studied her, which Starkey also didn’t like. It made
her feel watched, as if Dana was waiting for her to do or say something
more that she could write down. It was a valid interview technique which
Starkey used herself. If you said nothing, people felt compelled to fill
the silence.
"The job is all I have left, damnit."
Starkey blurted it, regretting the defensive
edge in her voice, and felt even more embarrassed when Dana again
scribbled a note.
"So you told Lieutenant Kelso that you
would seek help on your own?"
"Jesus, no. I kissed his ass to get out of
it. I know I have a problem, Dana, but I’ll get help in a way that
doesn’t fuck my career."
"Because of the thumb?"
Starkey stared at Dana Williams with the same
flat eyes she would use on Internal Affairs.
"Because I’m falling apart."
Dana sighed, and a warmth came to her eyes that
infuriated Starkey because she resented having to be here, and having to
reveal herself in ways that made her feel vulnerable and weak. Carol
Starkey did not do ‘weak’ well, and never had.
"Carol, if you came back because you want
me to fix you as if you were broken, I can’t do that. Therapy isn’t
the same as setting a bone. It takes time."
"It’s been three years. I should be over
this by now."
"There’s no ‘should’ here, Carol.
Consider what happened to you. Consider what you survived."
"I’ve had enough with considering it. I’ve
considered it for three fucking years."
A sharp pain began behind her eyes. Just from
considering it.
"Why do you think you keep changing
therapists, Carol?"
Starkey shook her head, then lied.
"I don’t know."
"Are you still drinking?"
"I haven’t had a drink in over a
year."
"How’s your sleep?"
"A couple of hours, then I’m wide
awake."
"Is it the dream?"
Carol felt herself go cold.
"No."
"Anxiety attacks?"
Starkey was wondering how to answer when the
pager clipped to her waist vibrated. She recognized the number as Kelso’s
cell phone, followed by 911, the code the detectives in the Criminal
Conspiracy Section used when they wanted an immediate response.
"Shit, Dana. I’ve gotta get this."
"Would you like me to leave?"
"No. No, I’ll just step out."
Starkey took her purse out into the waiting
room where a middle-aged woman seated on the couch briefly met her eyes,
then averted her face.
"Sorry."
The woman nodded without looking.
Starkey dug through her purse for her cell
phone, then punched the speed dial to return Kelso’s page. She could
tell he was in his car when he answered.
"It’s me, Lieutenant. What’s up?"
"Where are you?"
Starkey stared at the woman.
"I was looking for shoes."
"I didn’t ask what you were doing,
Starkey. I asked where you were."
She felt the flush of anger when he said it,
and shame that she even gave a damn what he thought.
"The west side."
"All right. The bomb squad had a call-out,
and, um, I’m on my way there now. Carol, we lost Charlie Riggio. He
was killed at the scene."
Starkey’s fingers went cold. Her scalp
tingled. It was called ‘going core.’ The body’s way of protecting
itself by drawing the blood inward to minimize bleeding. A response left
over from our animal pasts when the threat would involve talons and
fangs and something that wanted to rip you apart. In Starkey’s world,
the threat often still did.
"Starkey?"
She turned away and lowered her voice so that
the woman couldn’t hear.
"Sorry, Lieutenant. Was it a bomb? Was it
a device that went off?"
"I don’t know the details yet, but, yes,
there was an explosion."
Sweat leaked from her skin, and her stomach
clenched. Uncontrolled explosions were rare. A bomb squad officer dying
on the job was even more rare. The last time it had happened was three
years ago.
"Anyway, I’m on my way there now. Ah,
Starkey, I could put someone else on this, if you’d rather I did
that."
"I’m up in the rotation, Lieutenant. It’s
my case."
"All right. I wanted to offer."
He gave her the location, then broke the
connection. The woman on the couch was watching her as if she could read
Starkey’s pain. Starkey saw herself in the waiting-room mirror,
abruptly white beneath her tan. She felt herself breathing. Shallow,
fast breaths.
Starkey put her phone away, then went back to
tell Dana that she would have to end their session early.
"We’ve got a call-out, so I have to go.
Ah, listen, I don’t want you to turn in any of this to the insurance,
okay? I’ll pay out of my own pocket, like before."
"No one can get access to your insurance
records, Carol. Not without your permission. You truly don’t need to
spend the money."
"I’d rather pay."
As Starkey wrote the check, Dana said,
"You didn’t finish the story. Did you catch the man who made the
firecrackers?"
"The little girl’s
mother took us to a garage two blocks away where we found him with eight
hundred pounds of smokeless gunpowder. Eight hundred pounds, and the
whole place is reeking of gasoline because you know what this guy does
for a living? He’s a gardener. If that place had gone up, it would’ve
taken out the whole goddamned block."
"My lord."
Starkey handed over the check, then said her
good-byes and started for the door. She stopped with her hand on the
knob because she remembered something she’d been wondering about, and
had intended to ask Dana.
"There’s something about that guy I’ve
been wondering about. Maybe you can shed some light."
"In what way?"
"This guy we arrested, he tells us he’s
been building fireworks his whole life. You know how we know it’s
true? He’s only got three fingers on his left hand, and two on his
right. He’s blown them off one by one."
Dana turned pale.
"I’ve arrested a dozen guys like that.
We call them chronics. Why do they do that, Dana? What do you say about
people like that who keep going back to the bombs?"
Now Dana took out a cigarette of her own and
struck it. She blew out a fog of smoke and stared at Starkey before
answering.
"I think they want to destroy
themselves."
Starkey nodded.
"I’ll call you to reschedule, Dana.
Thanks."
Starkey went out to her car, keeping her head
down as she passed the woman in the waiting room. She slid behind the
wheel, but didn’t start the engine. Instead, she opened her briefcase,
and took out a slim silver flask of gin. She took a long drink, then
opened the door, and threw up in the parking lot.
When she finished heaving, she put away the gin
and ate a Tagamet.
Then, doing her best to get a grip on herself,
Carol Starkey drove across town to a place exactly like the one where
she had died.
This
concludes the excerpt from Robert Crais' DEMOLITION ANGEL
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